Past Exhibitions

In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Kwame Brathwaite (born Brooklyn, New York, 1938) used photography to popularize the political slogan “Black Is Beautiful.” This exhibition—the first ever dedicated to Brathwaite’s remarkable career—tells the story of a key figure of the second Harlem Renaissance. Inspired by the writings of activist and Black ...

Suzanne Bocanegra’s immersive video installation Valley (2018) presents eight women artists reenacting Judy Garland’s wardrobe test for the 1967 cult film Valley of the Dolls. Garland’s casting as a lead in the story of three women undone by drugs and show business was brief; suffering from addiction herself and reputedly unpredictable, Garland was ...

Jack Shear has long had an interest in how artists collect the work of other artists. In 1999 he co-organized an exhibition on this topic at New York's Drawing Center, Drawn from Artist's Collections. A deeply curious collector with an interest in many types of art, he has recently focused much of  his attention ...

Leo Steinberg was the rare art historian who turned his inquisitive eye and captivating prose to both Renaissance and modern art. His astonishingly wide-ranging scholarship addresses such canonical artists as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns. While Steinberg’s significance to the field of art history is ...

How does someone build an art collection? For John A. Robertson (1943–2017), a renowned bioethics scholar and distinguished professor at The University of Texas at Austin School of Law, the process was both dynamic and highly personal. Robertson’s wide-ranging collection of modern and contemporary works on paper, nurtured by his own passion for ...

Diedrick Brackens constructs intricately woven textiles that speak to the complexities of Black and queer identity in the United States. Interlacing diverse traditions, including West African weaving, European tapestries, and quilting from the American south, Brackens creates cosmographic abstractions and figurative narratives that lyrically merge lived experience, commemoration, and allegory. He uses both ...

In the early 20th century, artists began exploring abstract, nonrepresentational forms for the first time and significantly changed the language of painting.  Several decades later, abstraction continued to evolve robustly, as its practitioners experimented with new materials and techniques. Dripping, pouring, staining and even slinging paint became common, as did the use of ...

The 1920s were a period of rapid modernization and artistic innovation across the globe; magazines played an integral role in disseminating bold new ideas and movements. The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s explores this history in Latin America through the magazine Amauta, published in Peru from 1926 to 1930. With ...

Ed Ruscha: Drum Skins debuts a new body of more than a dozen round paintings made between 2017 and 2019 by the pioneering American artist known for his use of language.  The presentation features text Ruscha painted on found drumheads that he has collected over the past forty years. Informed by memories of ...

The Blanton will screen the third and final installment of Egyptian artist Wael Shawky's widely-acclaimed series Cabaret Crusades, his epic exploration of the religious wars fought in the Medieval period. Cabaret Crusades III: The Secrets of Karbala (2014) is, like all three works in the trilogy, based on the 1983 book The Crusades ...

Artists have long created images of themselves engaged in art-making in order to elevate their social status and establish their cultural importance. Whether in grand self-portraits, views of studios and art academies, or depictions of outdoor sketching expeditions, artists frequently cast themselves as their primary subject. Showcasing representations of artists at work from ...

From griffins and giants to demons and dragons, monsters have enthralled people throughout time. In medieval art and literature, these fanciful creatures give form to fears, curiosities, and fantasies of the unfamiliar and the unknown. Medieval Monsters, organized by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, will present a lively array of monsters that appear in more than ...

This exhibition focuses on a gift from Dr. Gilberto Cárdenas, a leading collector of Latinx art, of prints produced at Self Help Graphics and Art. Located in East Los Angeles, this printmaking workshop and cultural institution has been a mainstay in the city’s arts community since 1972. Sister Karen Boccalero and two Mexican-born ...

Joiri Minaya’s video Labadee explores the social and economic dynamics at play in Labadee, Haiti, on a private beach leased to Royal Caribbean cruise lines until 2050. Connecting the Caribbean tourism industry with the legacy of invasion and colonization, the video begins with passages from Christopher Columbus’s diary recounting his arrival in the ...

The University of Texas at Austin is honored to be the home of twenty-three works by Charles White, one of the 20th century’s most accomplished draftsmen and influential art educators. This exhibition celebrates the artist’s remarkable career and legacy, made possible by the generous gift of artworks from Drs. Susan G. and Edmund ...

Sculptor Lily Cox-Richard presents new work that responds to the history and materiality of the Blanton’s William J. Battle Collection of Plaster Casts, a set of nineteenth-century replicas of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures and one of the few remaining collections of this kind in the United States. Such casts were once an integral ...

Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day is a vibrant, celebratory exhibition in which the artist brings together his Choctaw and Cherokee heritage and a range of diverse artistic and cultural influences to explore race, sexuality, religion, and gender. More than 50 works made between 2014 and 2018 include intricately beaded wall hangings and ...

Exactly 500 years ago, in August of 1519, an expedition led by the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortés began marching inland into Mexican territory. Just two years later, what today is Mexico City fell to an ethnically diverse army composed of both Spanish and local peoples from other cities, starting a long period of ...

Jeremy Blake’s haunting Winchester trilogy explores the history of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. In the late 1800s, Sarah Winchester, heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, began to turn her eight-bedroom home into a sprawling mansion. Over the course of thirty-six years, Winchester hired construction workers to continually build ...

Artistic training in the Renaissance involved drawing, or copying, from nature, from antique sculptures and from the work of other acclaimed artists.  While Raphael and Michelangelo were painting for the Popes in Rome, skilled printmakers such as Marcantonio Raimondi and Giorgio Ghisi were widely disseminating the painters’ famous compositions through the relatively new ...

This film by The Propeller Group, an artist collective based in Vietnam and California, combines actual footage and staged portrayals of Vietnamese funeral rituals that shift dramatically from documentary to poetic. Music plays a significant role in the narrative trajectory, beginning with Vietnamese instrumentation and concluding with a New Orleans-style brass band, establishing ...

Drawn primarily from the Blanton’s extensive collection of Latin American art, Words/Matter offers an innovative perspective on how artists of this region have explored the links between visual art and written language since the early decades of the twentieth century. Words/Matter explores key moments in the artistic fascination with the written word, ranging ...

The Blanton Museum of Art presents a solo exhibition of new work by Kambui Olujimi, a Brooklyn native whose multi-disciplinary practice calls attention to the assumptions that underlie our understanding of the world at large. In Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time, the artist explores, among other concerns, the interlocking systems of power and invisible hierarchies ...

The Symbolist movement spanned European nations and creative genres in the final decades of the nineteenth century. First writers, then visual artists, sought to “clothe the idea in sensuous form,” as Jean Moréas wrote in his 1886 Symbolist manifesto. More a sensibility than a single artistic style, Symbolism evoked feeling, meaning, and intangible ...

In the video Drum Solo [Solo de Tambor] (2000; 19 min) Liliana Porter brings to life a cast of recurrent toy-like characters that have appeared in her artworks over the years. Through straight-forward animation and accompanied by a music score by Sylvia Meyer, vintage figurines perform in humorous, absurd, and sometimes moving vignettes. Porter’s installation Labor forzada [Forced ...

Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design showcases the work of over 120 artists and designers and illustrates how African design accompanies and fuels economic, social, and political change in the continent. Through sculpture, prints, fashion, furniture, film, photography, apps, maps, digital comics, and more, the exhibition presents Africa as a hub of experimentation ...

Wangechi Mutu’s animated video The End of eating Everything features the singer Santigold as a post-apocalyptic being hovering in a darkened sky. Her bulbous, tumor-like body, covered in human limbs and machine parts, throbs and emits plumes of smoke as she greedily devours a flock of birds. Mutu’s monstrous creation suggests the destructive—and ...

Eugène Atget trained his lens on the city and people of Paris for nearly four decades. The resulting photographic archive presents an enigmatic portrait of an evolving metropolis at the dawn of the twentieth century. This exhibition pairs over thirty photographs, printed from Atget's glass plate negatives, with etchings, engravings, and lithographs by ...

For the in-depth exhibition page, visit blantonmuseum.org/valdezthecity    

In the 1960s–70s, artists in Latin America participated in the profound reorientation of art traditions known loosely at the time as Conceptualism. From the Page to the Street illustrates the diverse forms these new practices took – including photographs and video, mail art, poems, Xerox copies, publications, and proposals – and the critical ...

Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art from the Kaplan & Levi Collection features contemporary painting and sculpture by Australian Aboriginal artists. Curated by Pamela McClusky, Curator of African and Oceanic Art at the Seattle Art Museum, the exhibition celebrates the renaissance that has occurred since the 1970s within the millennia-old traditions of indigenous Australian art. ...

In 2013, Lenka Clayton attempted to objectively measure the furthest distance she could be from her toddler son in three environments: a city park, the alley behind their Pittsburgh home, and in the aisles of a local supermarket. The trio of videos humorously underlines the challenging judgment calls that parents make about how ...

Depicting foreshortened figures and employing dramatic perspective, Renaissance and Baroque painters created convincing illusions on church ceilings and palace walls. This exhibition showcases drawings artists used to develop and record ideas for paintings that filled grand architectural spaces. Often the boundary between the real and the imagined is blurred in these works, allowing ...

Born in El Paso, James Drake grew up in Guatemala and now lives in Santa Fe. His work often explores borders and boundaries: of gender, of language, and of those between countries and cultures, especially between the United States and Mexico. In "Tongue-Cut Sparrows," Drake worked with the female partners of men imprisoned ...

Austin, the monumental last work by renowned American artist Ellsworth Kelly (1923—2015), is a freestanding stone building with luminous colored glass windows that is now part of the Blanton’s permanent collection. The structure has its roots in the artist’s deep appreciation of historical European art and architecture, and this exhibition explores how Austin’s conceptual origins began ...

The title of Clarissa Tossin’s (Brazil, 1973) new body of work is taken from the confluence of the Rio Negro and Amazon Rivers, where the two bodies of water, each very different in color, converge but remain separate. Her exhibition in the Blanton’s Contemporary Project space will feature the artist’s sculptures, including a ...

Lais Myrrha (Belo Horizonte, 1974) addresses the failures of Brazil’s mid-century modernist project through a critique of architecture and its primary materials.  Her video Infinite Column (2011) features cement bags being continuously stacked in a single, increasingly unstable column. Titled after an iconic monument by Constantin Brancusi, Myrrha’s video questions the role of monuments and ...

In the twentieth century, as some artists began to reject traditional representation and explore abstraction, many adopted an elemental vocabulary of lines, shapes, and colors. Flourishing simultaneously in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, this graphic lexicon is visible in many of the century’s artistic movements, such as concrete art, hard-edge abstraction, ...

The American photographer Stephen Shore once declared, “Our country is made for long trips.” While the myth of the Western frontier had long engaged artists, and photographers including Walker Evans and Edward Weston immortalized their travels through the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, the American road trip gained new prominence in ...

By the year 1500, a new genre of visual and literary culture was thriving in Europe: the dance of death or danse macabre. Dancing with Death will feature works on paper spanning from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries that highlight this visual tradition of bringing death to life. By animating death and transforming ...

This animation by Shahzia Sikander (Lahore, Pakistan, 1969) is set in an imperial Mughal court, with stylized hairdos rising from the disappearing bodies of Gopi women, or female worshippers of the Hindu god Krishna. Black hair rises from the women’s heads in a swarm of dark, swirling forms, like a flock of birds ...

This exhibition celebrates The Contemporary Austin’s recent gift to the Blanton Museum and underscores our commitment to building a world-class collection of contemporary art in Austin. It features contemporary sculpture, drawing, and photography, including Polly Apfelbaum’s Townsville (2000), a sculpture composed of colorful hand-dyed pieces of velvet arranged in a spiral on the floor, and six prints made by ...

July 9 - October 15, 2017 Comprising 91 Indian paintings from the renowned Edwin Binney 3rd Collection at the San Diego Museum of Art, this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue will introduce audiences to beloved characters such as Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Krishna, and the great Persian hero Rostam—as well as an assortment of ...

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s expansive practice interweaves hybrid forms of storytelling and invites suggestive, open-ended reflections on place, history, and memory. In their three-channel film installation Giant (2014), Hubbard / Birchler present a decaying movie set just outside Marfa, Texas, left behind after the 1956 filming of Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock ...

In the projected video, FOLD (2010), a grid of twelve-by-eight frames captures the Indian-born, San Francisco-based artist Surabhi Saraf in jeans and a white shirt as she folds laundry on the couch. Through color, sound, repetition, fragmentation, and multiplication, Saraf turns a prosaic activity into a captivating visual and sonic experience. With a ...

The Blanton Museum of Art presents Piranesi’s Rome, an exhibition of more than forty prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), along with large-scale maps of Rome, books, and plaster casts of Greek and Roman architectural fragments. From technical cross-sections of bridges to fantastical images of ruins, Piranesi’s prints will take you on a journey ...

This mid-career survey will explore approximately ten major bodies of work by celebrated Brooklyn-based artist Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968), including video, photography, sculpture, sound art, and a live performance. Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser is organized by Blanton curator of modern and contemporary art, Veronica Roberts, and will be the first touring museum exhibition of ...

The Paper Vault showcases the Blanton’s collection of more than 16,000 prints, drawings, and photographs. Curators will rotate selections throughout the year, engaging visitors with prints and drawings that are rarely on view. The first rotations include twenty-four mezzotints illustrating John Milton’s epic poem in John Martin: Paradise Lost, and Red Chalk Drawings, a ...

The Contemporary Project is a gallery on the museum’s 2nd floor devoted to recently-made art. Installations will rotate throughout the year. Inaugurating the Blanton’s Contemporary Project gallery is Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz’s Part File Score.  First exhibited at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2014, the work is an immersive experience of sound ...

Javier Téllez' film and installation work challenges the role of authoritative institutions and established notions of normalcy. For this black and white film transferred to video, Téllez stages an enactment of an Asian parable that recounts how six blind individuals were asked to touch an elephant and relay their experience. The title for ...

October 16, 2016 – January 29, 2017 The first exhibition in the United States to examine this significant body of work, Warhol By the Book is a comprehensive examination of Andy Warhol’s extensive work in books—an overlooked but important facet of the artist's creativity and career. Featuring jacket covers, illustrations, drawings, screen prints, ...

June 19, 2016 - September 25, 2016 The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents Goya: Mad Reason, an exhibition of nearly 150 prints and paintings by renowned Spanish court painter Francisco de Goya. The series of prints comprising Goya: Mad Reason—borrowed from Yale University Art Gallery’s distinguished ...

June 19, 2016 - January 22, 2017 The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents Xu Bing: Book from the Sky, a monumental installation by celebrated Chinese artist Xu Bing. Regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Chinese art, Book from the Sky ushered in the avant-garde ...

April 23, 2016 - July 3, 2016 The Blanton Museum of Art presents Fixing Shadows: Contemporary Peruvian Photography, 1968–2015, featuring more than 40 works from a transformational period of artistic growth, political turmoil, and social engagement in Peru. Realized in collaboration with the university’s Harry Ransom Center, this exhibition will present photographs from ...

February 21, 2016 - May 15, 2016 The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s, the first major museum survey to examine, within an historical context, art that emerged in this pivotal decade. The exhibition showcases approximately 45 artists born ...

December 12, 2015 - April 3, 2016 The Blanton Museum presents The Crusader Bible: A Gothic Masterpiece, an exhibition of over forty unbound pages from the one of the most celebrated French illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

October 11, 2015 - January 17, 2016 The Blanton presented Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978. Organized by the Americas Society in New York, the exhibition is the first to examine how design transformed the domestic landscape of Latin America, during a period marked by major stylistic developments and ...

August 29, 2015 - February 28, 2016 As part of a growing initiative to increase holdings by artists from Texas or currently based in the state, the Blanton Museum of Art presented a special installation of newly acquired works by San Antonio native Donald Moffett. In this intimate presentation, Moffett’s diverse and influential ...

July 11, 2015 - November 15, 2015 The Blanton Museum of Art presents Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm, an exhibition of more than 30 gouache and pastel drawings by artist Natalie Frank, a New York-based Austin native. Organized by The Drawing Center in New York, this presentation explores the nineteenth-century fairy tales of ...

June 14, 2015 - September 6, 2015 The Blanton Museum presents Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World, an exhibition of approximately eighty paintings by Realist-Impressionist painter Francisco Oller (1833–1917) and his contemporaries. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum and debuting at the Blanton, the exhibition reveals Oller’s important contributions to ...

March 7, 2015 - June 21, 2015 The Blanton Museum of Art and the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin present Wildly Strange: The Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The exhibition features over 35 photographs—including never-before exhibited prints—exclusively drawn from the Ransom Center’s photography collection and archives of writers ...

February 15, 2015 - May 10, 2015 The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, an exhibition of approximately 100 works by 66 artists that explores how painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and photography not only responded to the political and ...

October 19 - January 4, 2015 The Blanton Museum of Art presented an immersive exhibition of works by virtuosic draftsman James Drake. Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash) represented the culmination of two consecutive years of active creation by the Texas native, now Santa Fe-based artist. Committing to draw every day for ...

September 20 - February 15, 2015 The Blanton Museum of Art presented La línea continua, a selection of approximately 70 works from the Judy and Charles Tate Collection of Latin American art. Recently gifted to the museum, the collection—the entirety of which will ultimately come to the Blanton—includes painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, and ...

June 22, 2014 - September 21, 2014 Throughout history, artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Francisco Goya, and William Wegman have created works that explore the relationship between people, cats, and dogs. Today amateur videographers post videos to the Internet that receive thousands of views daily. What is the reason for our enduring fascination ...

June 2014 [caption id="attachment_1409" align="alignright" width="203"] Takahashi Hiroaki (Shotei), Published by Fusui Gabo,Cat Prowling Around a Staked Tomato Plant, 1931Woodblock print, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Gift of Stephanie Hamilton in memory of Leslie A. Hamilton[/caption] To introduce our new exhibition,  In the Company of Cats and Dogs, curator Francesca Consagra shares a ...

March 2014 An embroidered mantle patterned in vivid indigos and reds. A meticulously modeled crustacean in clay. Black ceramic bottles burnished to give off a metallic sheen. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="320"] Nasca Culture, Peru,Early Intermediate Period (100 BCE - 600 CE),Bowl with aji (chili peppers),Ceramic, slip paints,Department of Art and Art History, College ...

February 23, 2014 - May 18, 2014 Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt celebrated the close friendship between two of the most significant American artists of the post-war era: Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). Organized by Veronica Roberts, the Blanton’s curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition featured approximately ...

February 23, 2014 - May 18, 2014 Perception Unfolds: Looking at Deborah Hay’s Dance presented an innovative union of art, dance and technology within a museum setting. With its debut at the Blanton, the site-specific video installation combined the groundbreaking choreography of dance pioneer Deborah Hay with new software technologies created to study ...

February 2014 This weekend, we opened the much-anticipated exhibition Between Mountains and Sea: Arts of the Ancient Andes. A collaboration with UT's Department of Art and Art History, the exhibition comprises a special selection of objects that illuminate the lifestyle, technological achievements, and ideology of pre-Inka cultures among the coastal Andes of South America. With ...

February 1, 2014 - August 17, 2014 The Blanton Museum of Art, in partnership with the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, presented a special selection of objects that illuminated the lifestyle, technological achievements, and ideology of pre-Inka cultures among the coastal Andes of South America.

October 27 - January 12, 2014 The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin and the Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre, Brazil have joined together to organize the first comprehensive career survey of one of Brazil’s most important contemporary artists: Waltercio Caldas. The Nearest Air: A Survey of ...

October 5 - January 5, 2014 One of the oldest cities in Germany, Augsburg was founded as a Roman military fortress in 15 BCE. During the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519), Augsburg hosted the Imperial Council and became the center from which the emperor organized all of his print and ...

August 31 - December 8, 2013 In a special investigation of the far-reaching influence and wide-ranging interpretations of Cubism in the early twentieth century, the Blanton Museum of Art brings together iconic works from France, the Americas, and Eastern Europe in Cubism Beyond Borders.

June 23 - September 22, 2013 Organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Lifelike invites a close examination of artworks based on commonplace objects and situations, which are startlingly realistic, but often made of unusual materials in unexpected sizes.

June 8 - September 15, 2013 Luminous: 50 Years of Collecting Prints and Drawings at the Blanton highlights the breadth and depth of the museum’s collection of works on paper and provides a rare opportunity to see some of the finest examples displayed together for the first time.

February 24 - May 19, 2013 Through the Eyes of Texas: Masterworks from Alumni Collections is an exhibition of nearly 200 extraordinary objects from the art collections of University of Texas at Austin alumni living across the country. Marking the occasion of the Blanton’s fiftieth anniversary, this special survey includes ancient Mayan vessels, ...

November 17, 2012 - September 1, 2013 Antonio Carneo’s seventeenth-century painting The Death of Rachel, restored by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, serves as the focal point of Restoration and Revelation: Conserving the Suida-Manning Collection, an exhibition that thoughtfully considers the ethical and aesthetic choices involved in art restoration and conservation.

October 6 - January 20, 2013 A selection of prints by celebrated English satirist William Hogarth, including his important eighteenth-century series Marriage à la Mode, A Rake's Progress, and Industry and Idleness.

September 16 - January 13, 2013 The Rules of Basketball is an exhibition of works by contemporary artist Paul Pfeiffer, presented in conjunction with a special display of James Naismith’s “Original Rules of Basket Ball” — the 1891 document that outlined the 13 original rules of the game. In a rare union, the ...

September 16 - January 13, 2013 Into the Sacred City: Tibetan Buddhist Deities from the Theos Bernard Collection explores the rich art and religion of this fascinating region through five mandalas and three thangkas dating from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries.

June 10 - August 12, 2012 The Collecting Impulse features 50 works from the collection of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel by artists Stephen Antonakos, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle and more.

February 26 - May 13, 2012 The Blanton Museum of Art is pleased to present American Scenery: Different Views of Hudson River School Painting, featuring 116 paintings from the Hudson River School, a loose collective of artists working in upstate New York from 1825-1875, whose works comprised America’s first native artistic style.

January 22, 2012 - April 15, 2012 The Marco Polo Syndrome: Contemporary Cuban Art presents a selection of The Blanton’s holding from some of the most important contemporary Cuban artists working today. The exhibition examines the cultural renaissance of 1980s Cuba that swept the visual arts, cinema, literature, and theatre.

January 14 - September 23, 2012 Go West! is an exhibition exploring the pioneering American West as both a physical terrain and an idea deeply rooted in the American psyche. The exhibition features paintings, sculptures, and works on paper made in, and about, the American West by Henry Farny, Charles Russell, Maynard Dixon, ...

December 3, 2011 - April 16, 2012 Pun Value, an intimate display of four works by Lozano, demonstrates the diversity of the artist’s interests throughout her short career. All of the included works feature suggestive verbs as titles: Ream, Stroke, and General Strike Piece. Two are paintings, one is a study for a ...

November 11, 2011 - December 30, 2012 As a special complement to El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa, the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin will present Passage,a temporary installation by artist Paul Villinski. On view through December 30, 2012, the large scale, multi-media ...

September 25, 2011 - January 22, 2012 The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin will serve as the only southwest venue for El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa, a major retrospective of internationally renowned artist El Anatsui organized by the Museum for African Art ...

September 18 - December 31, 2011 Organized by The Blanton, and comprising fifty-eight works drawn primarily from the museum’s Suida-Manning Collection, the exhibition explores the expressive and technical range of French drawing through preliminary sketches, compositional studies, figure studies, and finished drawings from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.

June 25, 2011 - August 21, 2011 Overture: New Ways of Seeing The Blanton Collection features a selection of fifty-seven works from across the museum’s holdings designed to welcome visitors to the art museum experience. Spanning centuries and continents, the display includes visitor favorites and rarely-seen works in all mediums by James Surls, ...

April 30 - September 4, 2011 About Face: Portraiture as Subject gathers together 40 portraits in diverse mediums and across a range of time periods to examine how personality and aspects of character are portrayed in art. From a Roman bust to a contemporary video portrait, from allegorical attributes of rank and privilege ...

February 20 - May 22, 2011 Organized by The Blanton, Recovering Beauty will be the first comprehensive presentation of art produced during the 1990s in Buenos Aires, a time of pivotal transformation in Argentina. The exhibition will focus on the work of artists identified as the “arte light” group, which rose to prominence ...

October 2 - January 2, 2011 Forty of the finest nineteenth-century paintings from The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, including works by Eugène Delacroix, J.A.D. Ingres, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, J.M.W. Turner and Asher B. Durand, among others, illustrate the striking range of styles, techniques, and approaches practiced during this era ...

August 14, 2010 - November 28, 2010 One of the last portfolios of prints made by the artist before his death in 1987, Andy Warhol's series of ten silkscreens, Ads, embodies the artist's signature Pop aesthetic. Using magazine advertisements and corporate logos from the 1950s—the moment in his career when he worked as ...

August 14, 2010 - January 16, 2011 Repartee: 19th-Century Prints and Drawings from The Blanton Collection is conceived as a companion exhibition of over 125 works examining in greater detail the artists and ideas introduced in the presentation of paintings in Turner to Monet: Masterpieces from The Walters Art Museum. The social and ...

May 23 - August 22, 2010 The Blanton is pleased to present New Works for the Collection, an exhibition highlighting more than sixty new acquisitions from among the hundreds of works recently acquired through gift and purchase. Strengthening key areas in The Blanton’s collection and offering fresh opportunities for learning, this selection includes ...

May 23 - August 22, 2010 Henri Matisse (1869–1954) may be best known as a painter and sculptor, but he himself placed no hierarchy on the mediums in which he worked. Each medium was exploited for its unique possibilities and became totally integrated with other formal and thematic concerns. Drawn from the extraordinary ...

March 20 - August 1, 2010 Pablo Picasso’s involvement with printmaking was a passionate and lifelong creative endeavor. His prolific output of prints underscored his development as an artist and revealed his seemingly limitless capacity for reinvention. This exhibition presents The Blanton’s holdings of Picasso’s prints, and highlights the artist’s uncanny ability to ...

March 20 - August 1, 2010 Featuring forty-five iconic images of Mexico in the first half of the 20th-century, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and His Contemporaries: Photographs from the Collections of the Harry Ransom Center and The Blanton Museum of Art examines the life and work of Manuel Álvarez Bravo . Commonly referred to ...

March 5 - October 17, 2010 Brooklyn-based artist Anna Craycroft explores educational methodology, theories of selfhood, and identity. Working in mediums including installation, drawing, computer programming and texts, she will transform The Blanton's WorkSpace gallery and adjoining e-lounge in to a library and classroom.

February 5 - April 25, 2010 Desire is a complex human emotion and a driving force in our lives from childhood through old age. We all can recall examples of literature, film, and music that are rife with expressions of desire. But how do contemporary visual artists portray desire, and all its attendant ...

November 28 - March 7, 2010 The Blanton possesses some thirty of Goya's prints, with several impressions from each of his major series. They include great rarities, like El Embozado, which was left unfinished at his death, and a number of recent acquisitions, like a brilliant proof impression from Los Proverbios.

November 14, 2009 - February 21, 2010 Pablo Vargas Lugo's WorkSpace project, Eclipses for Austin, explores solar eclipses as important collective rituals. Total eclipses of the sun provoke astonishment, anxiety, hope, joy, and fear and compel those who witness them to question their place in the world. For the project, 200 people gathered ...

November 1 - January 3, 2010 The Blanton presents a touring survey of recent works by the internationally acclaimed artist Teresita Fernandez. Organized by the University of Southern Florida Contemporary Art Museum, the exhibition features a spectrum of 10 major sculptures and room-size installations that abstract the experience of nature by addressing light, ...

October 4 - February 7, 2010 This fall the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to present Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece, on view October 4, 2009 - February 7, 2010. In 2008, the museum announced an important discovery regarding a work in the Blanton's collection ...

July 18 - November 15, 2009 The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents an exhibition of one of Texas' most loved and celebrated artists, Jerry Bywaters (1906 – 1989). Organized by the Meadows Museum of Southern Methodist University, Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker features 39 prints from ...

July 3 - October 1, 2009 The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin is pleased to present I Will Show You The Woe-Joy Man, a multi-media installation by Miami-based artist Jim Drain. The latest in the museum's WorkSpace series, Drain's installation will feature a new series of video ...

June 21 - September 27, 2009 The first comprehensive exhibition in the United States of this Latin American pioneering artist, the show examines the rise of modernist abstraction in Latin America — underscoring both the similarities and differences between Europe and South America — and chronicles Matto's early work made as a student ...

March 6 - June 21, 2009 Brooklyn-based artist Lisi Raskin presents Armada, a series of new sculptures based on the forms she found at the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG), a storage facility for military airplanes and aerospace crafts located at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona.

February 22 - May 17, 2009 Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture At Midcentury takes a look at the broad cultural zeitgeist of “cool” that influenced the visual, graphic, and decorative arts, furniture, architecture, music, and film produced in California in the 1950s and early 1960s. The exhibition, organized by ...

October 4 - February 22, 2009 Marcelo Pombo is one of the key figures to emerge from the 1990s art scene in Argentina, and was part of the movement know as Arte Light, which was formed by a group of artists associated with the Centro Cultural Rojas. His paintings make use of industrial ...

September 28 - January 18, 2009 A groundbreaking exhibition of work by artists associated with the Park Place Gallery, a prominent artists' cooperative space in 1960s New York. With their specific aesthetics, the group was often at odds with the predominant style of many artists of the era, and as a result, their ...

September 28 - January 18, 2009 On view September 28, 2008 to January 18, 2009, the exhibition of over 70 works examines the Conceptualist movement of the 1960s and '70s through the printmaking practices of the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW). The show also serves as a Latin American counterpart to Reimagining Space, ...

June 29 - August 24, 2008 A special exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints from the James A. Michener Collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts. The exhibition provides viewers a rare opportunity to examine the history of the medium from its inception in the 17th century through the 20th century, highlighting the techniques, ...

June 6 - September 21, 2008 Argentine artist Fabián Bercic will provide a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional Zen Garden in his site-specific installation for WorkSpace.

April 19 - September 17, 2008 Conceived as an introduction to this distinctive medium, the exhibition includes more than 100 rare works from the museum's collection, with examples from Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, Carol Bove, and many others.

April 19 - June 8, 2008 The art faculty exhibition returns with a revised format to a new home at the Blanton. This year, James Elaine, esteemed curator of the Hammer Projects series at the Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA, has selected an intriguing cross-section of works from amongst the faculty's broad ...

February 16 - May 25, 2008 Many of the artists in WorkSpace: In Katrina's Wake have initiated projects whose scale and shape extend well beyond the physical confines of an exhibition viewing space. These artists, including Paul Chan, Jan Gilbert, Jana Napoli, Rondell Crier, Carol Bebelle, Douglas Redd, and the collaborative Transforma Projects, ...

January 29 - March 16, 2008 The exhibition features 55 miraculous paintings from South America during the days of Spanish Colonialism in the Viceroyalty of Peru, which encompassed present-day Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, parts of Chile and Argentina, and Panama.

December 22 - April 8, 2007 Unlike earlier techniques of printmaking, lithography allows any artist to make and reproduce practically any size, shape, and character of mark. This versatility and faithfulness to the touch of the artist have often encouraged lithographs in which technique and graphic display tend to overshadow other meanings. Such ...

December 22 - April 8, 2007 Sensitive to human expression and capable of rendering it convincingly, Ribera, known as a painter, is notable for extending seventeenth-century realism to printmaking. While he only created 18 prints in his life, this exhibition of his etchings and those of his followers, Filippo Liagno, Salvator Rosa, and ...

December 15 - March 16, 2008 Macchi, who created Argentina's pavilion at the 2005 Venice Bienale, produces work that is characterized by drawing poetic potential from everyday situations and materials. His artwork explores the intersection of presence and absence in structures such as music, maps, and language.

November 3 - February 3, 2008 The New York–based, Honduran/American, artist Paul Ramirez Jonas investigates failed utopia and the brief moments in history when believed success alters the interpretation of the concept of progress. For this WorkSpace at the Blanton, Ramirez Jonas will draw on the words of famous Argentinean writer Jorge Luis ...

September 11 - November 18, 2007 Transactions focuses on artists who have adopted a radical approach to artistic production and distribution. In addition to showing at galleries and museums, these artists also operate within the public sphere, creating work for sites associated not with art, but with everyday life. Here viewers will see ...

September 11 - December 30, 2007 The first major retrospective of internationally renowned performance/video/installation artist Michael Smith and his New York-based collaborator, director/artist Joshua White. This extraordinary exhibition features some 30 years of videos, installation environments, and other performance-related materials detailing the adventures of “Mike,” a sweet but hapless Everyman character created by ...

September 8 - November 25, 2007 Albrecht Dürer: Prints from the Foundation of Lower Saxony and the Konrad Liebmann Foundation, Germany is a comprehensive survey of more than one hundred woodcuts and engravings by the German artist, providing extraordinary insight into his genius. Included in the exhibition are twenty impressions from the Blanton's ...

July 7 - October 21, 2007 Josefina Guilisasti is one of the leading contemporary artists working in Chile. Her work typically consists of multi-part painting installations that reflect on the history of art and issues surrounding representation in realist painting. For this WorkSpace, Guilisasti presents a major installation of eight canvases called Marfa/Puerto ...

June 1 - August 12, 2007 Continuing its Summer of Masterworks, the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to present Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery, on view through August 12, 2007. These important examples from Yale's distinguished drawings collection provide a compelling survey ...

May 18 - August 5, 2007 Celebrating the first anniversary of its new building with a summer of masterworks, the Blanton will host its first major exhibition of nineteenth–century European masterpieces. Drawn from a renowned collection known for its classically inspired art, the exhibition features works that explore the human figure in all ...

April 20 - August 26, 2007 For centuries, artists have used paper to make sketches, jot down ideas, record fleeting impressions, or prepare for large-scale paintings, sculptures, and installations. Works on paper are thus indelibly associated with the artist's hand as well as his or her imagination, and they are typically described as ...

April 20 - August 26, 2007 The mythology of marriage explored in art! A thematic approach to the material gives an historical perspective on a timely topic. Images of allegorical, religious, and royal weddings from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries will be presented as models for the ideal marriage with Abraham Bosse's wedding ...

April 20 - August 26, 2007 The art of Francesco Parmigianino was the most stylized and elegant in sixteenth-century Italy. It was also tremendously influential, inspiring developments in Italy through the rest of the century, helping establish mannerism as an international style, and setting the standard of artistic refinement for the next two ...

April 20 - August 26, 2007 Lithographs from two portfolios from the series New European Graphics published in 1921 and 1922 in Germany. Artists included in the portfolios are Wassily Kandinsky, George Grosz, Ernst Kirchner, Umberto Boccioni, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Oskar Kokoschka, and Max Beckman among others.

April 20 - August 26, 2007 In 2006 the Blanton received an important gift: Anselm Kiefer's stunning Sternenfall [Falling Stars] from 1998. This monumental painting by one of the most highly regarded artists working today allows the Blanton to begin the process of creating a truly global collection of contemporary art. Kiefer currently ...

February 20 - April 22, 2007 Journey through the vibrant cities of South America during the mid-twentieth century and witness the birth of Modernism in the Americas. Drawn from one of the world's leading collections of Latin American art, this exhibition examines the dynamic visual vocabulary of Geometric Abstraction that developed in the ...

January 13 - March 25, 2007 Raised on the West Coast and currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Matthew Day Jackson makes highly idiosyncratic objects and installations that combine natural, hand-crafted, and recycled materials with imagery and allusions that inspire wonder and surprise. Absorbed by legends of history and folklore, personal ...

December 22, 2006 - April 8, 2007 Presenting some 45 works from throughout Europe, this exhibition reveals a variety of inventive approaches to established ornamental motifs including geometric design, vegetal foliage, and grotesques, as well as fantastic objects and creatures.

October 13 - December 31, 2006 Trained in the field of printmaking in the late 1980s and part of the first generation of artists from Chile's post-dictatorship era, Cristián Silva has become a renowned artist on the Latin American contemporary art scene. Inspired by a wide range of subjects that are on one ...

September 19 - January 14, 2007 The first major U.S. exhibition of paintings by one of the principal figures of late-16th-century painting, Luca Cambiaso, is the first major international traveling exhibition hosted by the Blanton since the museum's opening in April. The Blanton is the exclusive U.S. venue for Luca Cambiaso, 1527–1585, providing ...

August 4 - December 10, 2006 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (July 15, 1606–October 4, 1669) is considered one of the greatest painters of all time. He has also been called “the greatest master of etching,” and it is his experimentation and technical superiority with this medium that has given him this name. Although ...

July 21 - October 1, 2006 New York-based artist Carol Bove (pronounced Boh-VAY) creates elegant sculptural installations that explore the cultural, spiritual, social, and political preoccupations of the 1960s and 1970s. For her exhibition at the Blanton, Bove has merged her interests in history and sculpture by making two miniature “sculpture gardens.” In ...

April 30 - August 13, 2006 This exhibition presents new works by Paul Chan, one of the country's most provocative new media artists. Urgent, thoughtful, and compassionate, his works—which have been cited for their visual intensity and graphic flair—pose deeply philosophical questions in order to provoke awareness and debate.

April 30 - July 9, 2006 Daniel Joglar is one of the leading young artists working in Argentina today. He creates magical and evocative formal compositions out of everyday objects—post-it notes, rulers, and reams of paper. A typical work by Joglar consists of various objects spread across a tabletop; what at first glance ...

April 29, 2006 - August 13, 2006 New works by established and emerging artists working in the United States and Latin America are featured in this grand opening exhibition. Over the last five years the museum's contemporary collection has grown dramatically. See for yourself what is new, now, and next in the art ...

August 20 - December 23, 2004 This final installment of 500 Years of Prints and Drawings includes 16th-century reproductions of ancient sculpture; interpretations of Titian, one of the great Renaissance painters masterpieces; the debut of the Blanton's full of collection of the early modern lithographs of Theodore Gericault; and contemporary artist William Kentridge's ...

August 20 - December 23, 2004 Be swept up in a world where paintings seem to spin, shimmer and twist. This exhibition will captivate viewers with vibrant, colorful paintings from the Blanton's Latin American collections. Created in the 1960s and 1970s, when many claimed that painting was “dead,” the artists represented in Twister ...

August 20 - December 23, 2004 The Blanton joins Cinematexas in presenting Roz (2004) a work by prominent video artist Burt Barr. Compelling and emotionally fraught, Roz depicts a beautiful young woman (the performer Roz LeBlanc) standing in the shower, water pouring over her head and shoulders. The woman opens her mouth and ...

August 20 - December 23, 2004 Showcasing the new Blanton museum complex and plaza currently under construction on the corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. and Congress Avenue, this exhibition features architectural plans, computer renderings, and a pictorial timeline of the building project. The new Blanton Museum will for the first time ...

January 30 - July 18, 2004 With more than 15,000 works, the Blanton's collection of prints and drawings is the largest and most historically balanced of its kind in the southern and southwestern United States and one of the most significant in the country. The museum's ongoing series 500 Years of Prints and ...

January 30 - July 18, 2004 The past year has seen a remarkable growth in the Blanton's Latin American collection, aided by the generous donations of Fran Magee and Gallery 106, Cecilia Buzio de Torres, Robert Michael, and numerous others. Fishing in International Waters reaffirms the Blanton's commitment to expanding the Latin American ...

August 27, 2003 - January 4, 2004 Still only beginning to reveal the wealth and personality of the recently acquired Leo Steinberg Collection, the Blanton's curator of prints, drawings, and European paintings, Jonathan Bober, presents a second selection of 100 works, illustrating the history of prints and printmaking from the 16th through the ...

August 27, 2003 - January 4, 2004 The Blanton's new curator of Latin American art, Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, emerges this fall with his first major exhibition for the Blanton. Lo feo de este mundo investigates works by artists who reject ideas of beauty in favor of the ugly, deformed, and imperfect. The exhibition features ...

August 27, 2003 - January 4, 2004 Painted egg cartons, a drawing on a leaf, a written action statement, video documentation of nude “happenings” and a perforated canvas hung away from the wall play off more conventional works as the Blanton's curator of American and Contemporary art, Annete DiMeo Carlozzi, guides visitors through ...

August 27, 2003 - January 4, 2004 This final installment of the Projections series of contemporary film and video works, selected by the Blanton's assistant curator of American and Contemporary art, Kelly Baum, showcases videos and films by emerging and established women artists. The works provocatively challenge gender stereotypes, assert female empowerment, and ...

August 27, 2003 - January 4, 2004 This experimental exhibition presents four contemporary works of art that explore notions of personal, racial, and cultural identity.

April 19 - July 27, 2003 Among American painters, the period 1958–1963 was a one of intense experimentation and increased activity that resulted in a profusion of new modes of representation. This exhibition is the second installment in an exploration of the burst of artistic activity that took place in the late 1950s ...

January 24 - July 27, 2003 In July 2002 the Blanton Museum of Art acquired the print collection of noted art historian and critic Leo Steinberg, adding 3,200 prints to the Blanton's holdings and includes masterpieces by Marcantonio Raimondi, Albrecht Dürer, Parmigianino, Cornelis Cort, Hendrick Goltzius, Claude Lorrain, Rembrandt, and Francesco Piranesi, as ...

January 24 - July 27, 2003 Visit the Blanton's screening room in the back of the downstairs gallery for a changing exhibition of projected videos and films by contemporary artists. Each installment brings together works by diverse artists exploring common themes in distinctly different ways.

January 24 - April 13, 2003 The late 1950s and early 1960s was a period of great transition in American art. Among American painters, especially those based in New York City, this time was one of intense experimentation and increased activity that resulted in a profusion of new modes of representation. Thanks to ...

September 13 - December 29, 2002 Cartoon Noir presents a small selection of the Blanton's most recent acquisitions of contemporary art. The exhibition features brand–new mixed media works by Trenton Doyle Hancock, Arturo Herrera, and Jeremy Blake and a recent work by Ellen Gallagher, each of which obliquely cites the darker side of ...

September 13 - December 29, 2002 In the 1960s a group of Argentine artists, inspired by advances in technology and the Constructivist tradition in Latin America and in Europe, began experimenting with the depiction of perceived space and spatial relationships in non-representational paintings. Known as Arte Generativo artists, they manipulated the most basic ...

September 13 - December 29, 2002 The Blanton continues its series of exhibitions revealing the many strengths of its collection of works on paper. Representing the 16th through 20th centuries, five focused presentations each explore a different, theme, technique, or artist from one century in the history of art.

September 13 - December 29, 2002 Throughout the period 1870–1950, American painters were struggling to synthesize the lessons of European masters while still creating images that were meaningful for their own place and time. Over decades of trial and error, an American-flavored modernist vision developed, and this exhibition, drawn from works in the ...

January 25 - July 28, 2002 time/frame continues the Blanton's exploration of temporality in 20th–century art. The exhibition features works drawn primarily from the Museum's significant contemporary Latin American collections, presenting important paintings, sculpture, installations, and other works side-by-side for the first time. Visitors have the opportunity to consider juxtapositions of large-scale paintings ...

January 25 - July 28, 2002 Five intimate exhibitions that highlight the range and depth of the Blanton's collection of prints and drawings. Each of the five exhibitions can be enjoyed on its own as a thematic exploration of works from one specific century. Together, the exhibitions trace the history of art from ...

August 29 - December 30, 2001 Last fall, the Blanton initiated a series entitled 500 Years of Prints and Drawings, which features groups of exhibitions that highlight the Blanton's encyclopedic collection of works on paper. With works of art representing the 15th through the 20th centuries, the series draws exclusively from the Museum's ...

August 29 - December 30, 2001 Past Present Future: Notions of Time in Twentieth-Century Art features works from the Blanton's renowned collections of twentieth-century American and Latin American art, exhibited together for the first time. Focusing on art created between 1915 and the early 1980s, the exhibition explores the multiple ways that artists ...